Obama’s campaign speech on the economy was an utter disaster for him. It was a bromide of tired old arguments, pathetic blame-placing, and shopworn con tricks. And even liberals like Jonathan Alter had to admit that it was, overall, a dramatic failure.

He began where he always does: with blame. “We’ve been wrestling with these issues for a long time,” he said. “The problems we’re facing right now have been more than a decade in the making …. For more than a decade, it had become harder to find a job that paid the bills, harder to save, harder to retire, harder to keep up with rising costs of gas and health care and college tuitions.” Translation: Blame Bush.

The Blame Bush nonsense continued apace:

We were told that huge tax cuts, especially for the wealthiest Americans, would lead to faster job growth. We were told that fewer regulations, especially for big financial institutions and corporations, would bring about widespread prosperity. We were told that it was OK to put two wars on the nation’s credit card; that tax cuts would create a enough growth to pay for themselves.

Fact: huge tax cuts did lead to greater job growth. Bush oversaw 52 consecutive months of job growth under his watch, beginning in September 2003 and December 2007.

Fact: tax cuts did begin to pay for themselves. The deficit began to shrink under President Bush between 2005 and 2007 thanks to increased tax revenue generated from economic growth.

Fact: fewer regulations did create widespread prosperity. What led to the economic meltdown was government pressure on private institutions to make shoddy loans to subprime borrowers.

Later in his speech, Obama rewrote history to turn this into malfeasance solely by Wall Street: “Without strong enough regulations, families were enticed and sometimes tricked into buying homes they couldn’t afford. Banks and investors were allowed to package and sell risky mortgages. Huge reckless bets were made with other people’s money on the line. And too many, from Wall Street to Washington, simply looked the other way.” Nobody was suckered into buying a home they couldn’t afford. They simply made bad decisions, incentivized to do so by the federal government.

But Obama wasn’t close to done. He suggested that the Bush economic policies only helped the top 1 percent – even though as Robert Reich has pointed out, “The top 1 percent got 45 percent of Clinton-era economic growth, and 65 percent of the economic growth during the Bush era. According to an analysis of tax returns by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, the top 1 percent pocketed 93 percent of the gains in 2010. 37 percent of the gains went to the top one-tenth of one percent. No one below the richest 10 percent saw any gain at all.” It is Obama’s economic policies that have benefitted the top 1 percent at the expense of everyone else.

Obama capped off the Blame Bush campaign point by stating that “this was not your normal recession.” That was true. What followed was not.

“Throughout history it has typically taken countries up to 10 years to recover from financial crises of this magnitude. Today the economies of many European countries still aren’t growing and their unemployment rate averages around 11 percent.” This was not a point in Obama’s favor, though his shoddy knowledge of history didn’t allow him to see that. The fact is that every recession in American history ever fought with tax cuts and less regulation led to quick recovery; every recession in American and European history fought with broader government spending and more regulation has led to prolonged misery.

Then Obama got into his litany of false accomplishments:

“Our businesses have gone back to basics and created over 4 million jobs in the last 27 months; more private sector jobs than were created during the entire seven years before this crisis, in a little over two years.” When a huge number of people are unemployed, it is easier to create jobs. The question isn’t how many jobs were “created.” It’s how many people are still out of work. This is choosing a selective timeline. Note that Obama doesn’t say what happened prior to the last 27 months.

“And when my opponents and others were arguing that we should let Detroit go bankrupt, we made a bet on American workers and the ingenuity of American companies and today our auto industry is back on top of the world.” Bankruptcy does not mean that companies lay off all their workers and shut their doors. It means they undergo forced reorganization. The fact is that the auto bailouts have left the taxpayer billions in the hole, and that Obama stuck stakeholders with the bill when he turned the American auto industry over to the auto unions.

“But let’s be clear: Not only are we digging out of a hole that is 9 million jobs deep, we’re digging out from an entire decade where 6 million manufacturing jobs left our shores; where costs rose but incomes and wages didn’t; and where the middle class fell further and further behind.”

Obama’s plan to bring those jobs back: tax the companies that want to ship them overseas, and force them to pay higher salaries and more benefits to American employees. Great plan.

But Obama’s real mission in all of this isn’t to say that he’s been successful (he knows he hasn’t been). It’s to demonize Romney – he’s going to cut things, big things! In fact, Obama created a fictional scenario – he admits in the speech he’s making this up – that would have Romney cutting certain popular government programs:

“They haven’t specified exactly where the knife would fall, but here’s some of what would happen if that cut that they proposed was spread evenly across the budget. 10 million college students would lose an average of a thousand dollars each on financial aid. 200,000 children would lose the chance to get an early education in the Head Start program. There would be 1,600 fewer medical research grants for things like Alzheimer’s and cancer and AIDS; 4,000 fewer scientific research grants, eliminating support for 48,000 researchers, students and teachers.”

Of course, he does admit this is fiction – of course the knife won’t fall evenly. And those cuts won’t be the big ones. But then Obama plays it as fact. Then he lies and says that Romney will raise taxes on the middle class. And he pretends that all economists agree with his failed approach.

Finally, after all this absolute rubbish, Obama gets to his own plan. What is it? Cliches! Check out some of these wonky proposals:

“I believe that you can’t bring down the debt without a strong and growing economy. And I believe you can’t have a strong and growing economy without a strong and growing middle class.” In fact, “middle class” is an Obama buzzword. It gets repeated over and over. What does this mean in terms of policy? Who knows?

“The race I want us to win — a race I know we can win — is a race to the top. I see an America with the best-educated, best- trained workers in the world; an America with a commitment to research and development that is second to none, especially when it comes to new sources of energy and high-tech manufacturing.” So he’s proposing … that we not be dumb. Great idea! Too bad that Romney guy didn’t think of that.

“I see a country that offers businesses the fastest, most reliable transportation and communications systems of anywhere on Earth.” So … a monorail?

“I see a future where we pay down our deficit in a way that is balanced — not by placing the entire burden on the middle class and the poor, but by cutting out programs we can’t afford and asking the wealthiest Americans to contribute their fair share.”

Sounds like fun. So when’s Obama going to repeal Obamacare to make this happen?

There is not one word of this cliché-ridden sentence that Mitt Romney would contradict. And Obama offers this as his “vision.”

His vision truly is spending a lot of money. He wants more spending on education. He wants more spending on college loans. He wants more spending on green energy programs. He wants more spending on government jobs programs. He wants more spending … more spending … more spending.

After all else had failed, Obama played Republican – proclaiming that he’s a tax-cutter and ignoring the fact that he has called for tax increases, and that come January 2013, Americans will face the widely-dreaded taxmageddon; shouting that he’s a deficit-reducer even as he jacks up the deficit to record rates; bragging about how he’s a low-spending president when he is clearly the highest-spending president in American history by a long shot.

Finally, Obama tried to turn back the clock to 2008. “Together, we touched the surface of the moon, unlocked the mystery of the atom, connected the world through our own science and imagination. We haven’t done these things as Democrats or Republicans. We’ve done them as Americans.”

We’ve heard this song and dance before.

And we’ve seen what happens when we believe it. We have a four-year record of incompetence covered by blame-mongering and lie-telling. Obama’s speech offered no new vision, no new solutions, not even any inspiring rhetoric. What a pathetic launch to a campaign about the economy. Then again, what a pathetic president.

FAIR USE NOTICE:This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www. law. cornell. edu/uscode/17/107. shtml

‘America’s Greece,’ California

dreams of raising taxes

Posted: May 21, 2012 2:16 PM ET

Last Updated: May 21, 2012 2:15 PM ET

Watching the twist and turns of the financial/political crisis gripping Greece can make you wonder whether there’s such a thing as too much democracy.

In the case of Greece, there is a common view that the stakes for the global economy are simply too high to let the Greeks decide for themselves how to run their country. Not that there’s any alternative handy.

On the opposite side are people who believe there can never be such a thing as “too much democracy.”

To them I would say, come to California.

Asking whether California is America’s Greece seems like a fair question to more and more people. It’s in financial crisis and, like Greece, has teetered on the brink of bankruptcy.

(With a GDP of about $1.9 trillion it also has an economy that is nearly six times that of Greece, so California’s too-big-to-fail impact on the global economy is not inconsiderable either.)

And once again this election year California voters are poised to make an even bigger mess of things through their devotion to direct democracy: the ballot initiative, which has made a mess of their tax system.

The most recent example of how the democratic impulses of Californians can morph into a tyranny of the majority was the 2008 ballot initiative (Proposition 8) that extinguished the court-ordered right of gay people to marry.

A court of appeal recently overturned that initiative and the U.S. Supreme Court will probably have to sort it all out.

But prior to Prop 8, California’s most famous ballot initiative was Prop 13 which, in 1978, handcuffed the legislature’s taxing ability.

The governor at the time, Jerry Brown (who is back in office now), opposed Prop 13, but the people overruled him.

Vote to raise taxes

Prop 13 put a cap on property taxes and today it is the untouchable third rail of California politics.

Too much democracy? Gov. Jerry Brown is asking Californians to agree to a sales tax increase in a referendum so he doesn’t have to cut any more services.(David McNew/Reuters)

Because property taxes made up a large part of education funding, Prop 13 not only dramatically affected revenues, it also restructured the way in which public schools are funded.

Today homeowners pay a one per cent tax on their property and their property assessments never exceed a two per cent increase a year unless there is a change in ownership.

Meanwhile, California’s schools, which were once among the best in the country, now rank about 48th in surveys.

Brown is once again governor of California and this time it is he who is using a ballot initiative to try to restore some fiscal responsibility to the state budget, which is currently $16 billion in deficit.

He wants to raise taxes.

Actually, he’s promising to cut spending but if he can get his tax hike approved, he’ll forego about $6 billion in spending and job cuts.

So that’s the trade-off; more taxes, fewer cuts.

The tax hike he’s proposing is an addition of one-quarter of one per cent to the state’s sales tax and a higher income tax rate for high-income earners.

It would be a clear choice for voters, except that Brown’s tax increase isn’t the only one likely to be on the ballot in November. There are several, including Molly Munger’s.

The Munger plan

Munger is a Pasadena lawyer with a very large bank account. Her father, Charles Munger, is the billionaire vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, which means Molly has one degree of separation from Warren Buffet, the Oracle of Omaha, who started all the hubbub about making rich people pay more taxes.

Munger’s ballot initiative would make most Californians pay higher taxes and it would stipulate that most of the revenue go to public schools and early childhood development programs.

She expects her campaign to cost more than $10 million, which means it will be a serious threat to the governor’s initiative.

And that’s the problem.

Generally speaking, support for raising taxes is going to come from the same Democrats who elected Brown, a group that probably includes Munger herself, so there might be just enough of their votes to carry the day.

Unless they split their vote between the governor’s tax plan and Munger’s, which they likely will.

In that case the same Democrats who elected Brown could end up blocking him from doing what they elected him to do, and forcing him to do exactly what they don’t want, which is cut even more spending.

If that’s how it turns out it in November, it will boggle the minds of many clever people, but in California, perhaps not unlike Greece, this is what democracy looks like.

About The Author

In the fall of 2009, after years of reporting on national politics from Ottawa, Keith Boag headed West to open up the CBC’s new Los Angeles Bureau and become the West Coast correspondent, reporting from the U.S. and Mexico.

It is difficult to convey the enormous impact fracking is going to have on America.

Now, if you only listened to radical environmentalists you would think fracking – a process that allows companies to extract natural gas from deep rock – is going to make large parts of America an environmental wasteland.

But my investigations have found that the truth about fracking is often obscured by campaigners’ scare stories and exaggerations.

Instead as I have investigated the process, I have discovered it is bringing a financial and energy revolution to some of the poorest parts of America. Quite simply, in America where there is fracking there is no recession or downturn. It is a stimulus package that came with no help from the government, is going to last for decades after the current politicians have left the scene, and will be producing so much natural gas that it may mean America finally becomes energy self-sufficient.

Although fracking arrived in these states without government assistance – government interference now threatens to stop the process in its tracks.

Thanks to the Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland, many people and many government officials believe fracking pollutes water and creates wastelands wherever it is used. The government is investigating and fracking is being banned in a number of states and regions across the country.

However, like so many documentaries nowadays Gasland is high on anecdote and emotion, but low on science and fact.

One of the most dramatic images in Gasland is footage of a resident lighting his tap water with flames shooting out of the faucet.

As a journalist I wanted to learn more, so I went to a Q&amp;A with Gasland director Josh Fox. As I questioned him, Fox eventually admitted that he knew people could light their tap water in these areas decades before fracking came on the scene. However Fox said that he did not include this fact in his documentary because “it was not relevant.” That was quite an admission so I quickly threw a recording of the Q&amp;A up on YouTube and to my shock Josh Fox’s lawyers wrote to YouTube threatening them unless the video was removed immediately.

Quicker than I could say “fair use,” Fox and his lawyers pursued my little clip across the internet and using threats shutting it down wherever it appeared.

I don’t respond very well to censorship so rather than shutting me up, Fox’s high-handed lawyering got me very interested in what he was trying to cover up. I decided to make my own documentary called FrackNation dedicated to telling the type of stories Josh Fox seems to want to suppress. But unlike Josh Fox and Gasland I could not rely on corporate financing from HBO – or wealthy Hollywood actors.

So along with my wife Ann McElhinney and co-director Magdalena Segieda we decided to use Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website. Kickstarter normally hosts proposals showcasing Occupy Wall Street or radical environmental style documentaries but we put our FrackNation pitch up and in just under eight weeks we have raised over $190,000 in small donations from 2800 members of the public.

For us it was proof that there was a truth out there that was being ignored by the establishment media.

Our backers know the truth about fracking and they are angry that their stories and experiences are not being properly represented in the media. They have seen environmental activists and journalists such as Josh Fox run with big headlines when the EPA launched investigations into water pollution “incidents” in Wyoming, Pennsylvania and Texas. But when it was later announced that there was no contamination – there was no retraction from the campaigners. According to the locals the media simply ignored the findings and moved on to report the next scare story.

We’ve interviewed farmers who are angry. One elderly farmer cried as he told me how it upset him that urban elites, such as Josh Fox and the actors Marc Ruffallo and Robert Redford said he doesn’t care about his own land.

One lady said Hollywood millionaires need to know that the farmers in these areas are not their slaves to be told what to do and how they should work their land.

Another farmer pointed out that without the money from the shale gas boom they will have to sell their farms – for housing. Do environmentalists want the green fields covered in houses?

We want to tell the truth about fracking but we need help from the public. Josh Fox is bringing out a sequel to Gasland. The Hollywood/Environmental establishment only wants to tell one (untrue) side of the story.

If you want to help tell the truth about fracking and restore some balance to the documentary world go to FrackNation.com. There is less than a day left to donate. We, and the millions of people across America who are looking to fracking for a better future, really need your help.

Welcome to WordPress.com! This is your very first post. Click the Edit link to modify or delete it, or start a new post. If you like, use this post to tell readers why you started this blog and what you plan to do with it.